This talk will bring together perspectives from philosophy, anthropology, psychiatry, and psychology to demonstrate how cultural variations in the placement of the self-other boundary impact approaches to mental illness and the psychiatric patient-clinician relationship. Dr. Sajber will compare the clinical model of Western industrialized societies to the treatment of schizophrenia in Zanzibar, Tanzania, where the locus of control characteristic of sociocultural beliefs is in much more fortuitous alignment with the caregiving environment’s emotional temperature. She will provide philosophical analyses of cultural beliefs which place a person’s agency outside of the self (such as beliefs in super-human powers or dependence on community support) and explain why, when combined with communications carrying low emotional charge, these turn out to be less stigmatizing within the community, and create better treatment outcomes for schizophrenia in both clinical and community-based settings.